Own a smartphone? Sure you do, and chances are good that it’s never that far away from you. That makes it a handy authentication tool, and that’s why Google wants to let you use it to log in to your Chromebook.

This isn’t a new concept, of course. There’s plenty of third-party software out there that lets you lock and unlock a computer when your phone moves out of its Bluetooth range. No one’s baked this in to an OS just yet, though, and it would be a nice added convenience for Chrome OS users.

Not that it’s a great idea to leave your laptop unattended in a public place, but with Chrome’s phone authentication feature enabled you could at least do so secure in the knowledge that anyone who grabbed it and ran off wouldn’t have access to your account. That’s one big advantage of proximity-based security. With only a screensaver time-out set up, a thief has unfettered access to your system if you forget to manually lock as long as the lid stays up and it doesn’t idle out.

It’s also an especially nice tweak for corporate settings. Wandered away from the Chrometop that your IT department just rolled out to replace your old XP machine (don’t laugh, it could happen)? No worries. It’ll lock automatically once you’re out of reach and no one from the competing R&D team will be able to snoop on your top secret files while you’re AFK.

The change has just landed in the Chrome OS developer channel, so it’ll be at least twelve weeks before it makes it to stable channel users. That’ll be about a month after Google I/O, but there’s a good chance Google will give everyone a brief demo while they’ve got developers gathered for their annual shindig.